Well, that about wraps it up for pork.

I like pork. Bacon, ham, sausage, chops, twice-cooked, mu shu, on pizza, in sandwiches… my mouth’s watering just thinking about it. But I’ve finally come to the conclusion that eating industrially-farmed pork is an indefensible position. So from now on, I’m not eating pork unless I know that it came from a small farm that doesn’t practice industrial-scale pig farming. There are farmers at the Farmers Market — Skagit River Ranch and Rootabaga Country Farm in particular — who I trust, and I will continue to eat the pork they sell. But deli and supermarket products are pretty much out, as is restaurant food.

In the end, it’s not so much about animal welfare for me. I’ve known for a long time that factory farming was pretty grim. Pigs are about as smart as dogs, and the conditions they’re kept in at large farms are certainly not something I’d be comfortable seeing dogs kept in. For example, do you know why piglets have their tails snipped off in industrial farms? It’s because they’re kept in such crowded conditions that they start eating each other’s tails, and they’re so demoralized that they don’t do anything to protect themselves when another pig starts eating them. And having your tail gnawed off apparently makes you sick. So the solution isn’t to do anything to keep the pigs happier; it’s to remove their tails so they’re not an easy target. But I’m mostly able to justify that, at least to myself.

No, I’ve decided to stop eating industrial pork, not because it’s bad for the pigs, but because it’s bad for humans. And not just in the “it’s loaded with antibiotics and other chemicals” sense.

One of Smithfield Foods’ pig farms in North Carolina, with a toxic pink shit lagoon the size of 4.5 football fields.

Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That’s a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson.

Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than transmogrifying the populations of America’s thirty-two largest cities into edible packages of meat. Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put Smithfield’s total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company’s slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.

And there’s the problem. Smithfield is producing more shit than the human population of New York, Texas and California combined (if I’ve done my math right, which I think I have), and if it had to process all that waste responsibly, it would go out of business. So it doesn’t even try.

Millions of tons of pig shit, filled with toxic chemicals, disease and who knows what else, sitting in open pits, waiting to flood into rivers and groundwater, be spread around by the next hurricane or sprayed up into the air to become someone else’s problem:

Spills aren’t the worst thing that can happen to toxic pig waste lying exposed in fields and lagoons. Hurricanes are worse. In 1999, Hurricane Floyd washed 120,000,000 gallons of unsheltered hog waste into the Tar, Neuse, Roanoke, Pamlico, New and Cape Fear rivers. Many of the pig-shit lagoons of eastern North Carolina were several feet underwater. Satellite photographs show a dark brown tide closing over the region’s waterways, converging on the Albemarle-Pamlico Sound and feeding itself out to sea in a long, well-defined channel. Very little freshwater marine life remained behind. Tens of thousands of drowned pigs were strewn across the land. Beaches located miles from Smithfield lagoons were slathered in feces. A picture taken at the time shows a shark eating a dead pig three miles off the North Carolina coast.

From a waste-disposal perspective, Hurricane Floyd was the best thing that had ever happened to corporate hog farming in North Carolina. Smithfield currently has tens of thousands of gallons of open-air waste awaiting more Floyds.

Alas, I still can’t set people on fire with the power of my mind, nor can I send my goons to throw them into their own toxic cesspools and leave them to die (which wouldn’t take long at all). So Joseph Luter III and the other people responsible for this are safe from me. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to give them any of my money.

50 thoughts on “Well, that about wraps it up for pork.”

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And we also buy our milk from Smith Brothers. We considered finding someone else, based on what we learned about what “organic” means in the dairy business (not all that much) and stayed with them. They offer unmodified milk at prices that compare or beat retail stores and the convenience is awfully hard to knock.

Cheese is harder but I generally buy Tillamook (as local as I can find for the quantity I use) or small makers, as best I can find them (ie, not Kraft). And eggs, as mentioned above, are cage-free since free-range is also meaningless.

The thing about all this is how much a process it is, versus a solution. We learn more or the situation changes, growers come and go, and we adapt. The only way to know everything about your food is to grow it yourself: everything else is a compromise, so you have to find one that works for you.

“I, admire, applaud the stance you’re taking. I think it reduces your “footprint” impact on the planet in a good way well, I think there’s something to the comprehensive line of thought which noted the problem as “Indefensible”, because at the very least, of the readily available alternatives.”

I’m not trying to be a creep (really), but one readily available alternative is stop eating pig meat. I mean, it’s pretty easy to NOT eat it at all.

And according to the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, livestock generated 1.36 billion tons of manure in 1997. According to my calculations, that comes to 43 TONS of livestock shit every SECOND.

Eh. Going vegetarian or vegan isn’t really something that interests me. I like eating meat, and if there’s a way to do so that isn’t reprehensible, I’d rather do that than deny myself the pleasure entirely.

That said, I’ve found that QuornTenders are every bit as good as chicken meat in a stir-fry. If only my favorite restaurants offered that as an option.

If I were ethically required to like every aspect of every optional activity I enjoy doing, I think I’d feel obligated to either kill myself or sell all my belongings and move to a cave (provided doing so wouldn’t displace a previous inhabitant), foraging for roots and grubs and eventually dying of dysentery.

I think it’s about lessening the footprint, actually getting the good stuff (Organic vs factory farmed) and while living your life at a nominal level, trying to spread that level to others across the globe.

You’re doing well, you’re living well, and the choices your making actually improve your life. Good on you; you’ve set it up so you can have these choices in this era, and you live in the US.
I don’t think “Going back” will help, unless it’s looking for alternatives.

The USSR came up with amazing technologies when they didn’t have the kind of money the US had to throw at their space program. There stuff works really well. Okay, maybe it’s worth taking a look at their alternatives. Kicking yourself because of the era. we were born in? I’m not so into that.
Gratuitous excess? Definately not into that, either.

I actually think that the Quorn stuff is a little better than chicken in a stir fry in that I don’t feel the urge to bleach the kitchen afterwards. (Campylobacter! Listeria! Salmonella! Argh!) Especially after an ugly bout of food poisoning a few years ago, I pretty much handle all raw meat, particularly chicken, under the Grouchy Chris rule: meat is a form of toxic waste that I attempt to cook into submission. So I find Quorn mighty convenient.

Speaking of proteinaceous things that go into stir-fries, I would not have found this possible a few years ago, but I’m starting to like tofu in a few things. (The mind reels.) Our local Thai place makes soy-sauce noodles with chunks of lightly seared tofu, and it’s fantastic.

Josh, I know you’d miss General Tso’s Chicken, but in truth, I think a lot of that is just that you’d miss getting the same old reliable good thing every time you went to Mandarin Chef. The cure for this, I propose, is to visit Mandarin Chef a lot more often and to order the string beans with almonds again and again. I will gladly help you test this hypothesis. Oh yes.

Cam’s onto something here: one of the benefits of liking more than meat and two veg, stuff like Indian, Asian, Italian, is that meat becomes less of a centerpiece. I don’t think the addition of any meat product could improve the gnocchi at Cafe Lago, frinstance.

If you like vegetables, being able to eat more of them is a Good Thing. As someone asked me at Thanksgiving “what do vegetarians eat?” Take the bird and the ham off the table and see what’s left: usually a dozen different dishes which, unless someone has done something evil to them, are all in play.

At the end of the day, it’s to your credit that you care enough to base your buying and eating decisions on good sound principles: I personally don’t care if you become a loony vegetarian, since I know you’re doing a whole more to make things better than most.

I should perhaps point out that meat is already not a centerpiece at our table. Josh will eat biggish chunks of meat, but I would much rather not — not for ethical reasons, but just because I find the texture yucky. (Especially steak. Yecccccch, ptui.) And neither of us grew up with much money at all, so “meat and two veg” was exotic. We learned in childhood that meat isn’t for eating in chunks, it’s for sprinkling in stuff.

So as a household, the meat we eat is always greatly extended with vegetables and/or grains. Even our occasional albondigas have a whole lot of rice in them, and we extend two or three chopped sausages into three-plus quarts of gumbo. I made meatloaf once, but I was disappointed: it had too much meat in it to be right.

That kind of thing makes this change easier. I have sympathy for folks who say, “But look at how much this stuff costs!” when they’re checking out more sustainably-raised meat. It works for us because (a) we’re big fat yuppies now and (b) we tend to use meat more as a condiment than as a main item anyway.

In S.F. there seems to be two kinds of Farmer’s markets, one sells niche quality stuff; perfect looking and for example, 4 colors of small carrots, 4 colors of potato or turnips. Then there are other markets, just as organic, but the prices take a steep dive the other way. Where one market most things are well over 2 per lbs, most are under 1.50 per lbs. I know a couple of farmer’s who take their prettiest to one and sell high, and then take the rest and sell low, serving both communities.

I also think a bunch of herbs and small veggies, are easy to grow, even gourmet mushrooms.

The way you’re talking about using meat, as an addition, is actually probably the healthiest.

Crap. And upon reading my own comment, I’m wondering how I got that diploma thingy on the wall. By saying “slow changes”, I was incredibly not implying that you’re making changes at a snail’s pace. I was more saying that it’s encouraging to read about all the major changes you have made over the last few years. I’ve enjoyed witnessing them, and it has inspired me to make changes myself.

Heh, no worries; that’s how I would have said it too. I knew what you meant. They are slow changes. I’m not going to become a vegetarian overnight, but I can see myself maybe being one in another five or six years. And it took, what, three years of bicycle commuting before we were ready to give up the car. I’m happy with slow.

Just a quick, belated comment re why we eat pigs but not dogs. At one time I thought like Ian that it was probably because carnivores taste different. But then it was brought to my attention that we eat plenty of carnivorous animals, namely fish. (Of course fish do have an odd taste, but I think that’s more to do with not being warm-blooded and mammalian.) The difference there is that we don’t raise fish on farms — they raise themselves and we collect them in nets.

So I think the issue isn’t herbivore/carnivore, it’s prey/predator. We don’t eat predators simply because they’d be a pain in the neck to raise and keep in an agricultural environment.